Opportunity abounds in Detroit — if you know where to invest

It's the hip, new destination for millennials seeking out-of-the-box careers. It's a travel destination for curious adventure-seekers. And it's the perfect place for people to invest in residential real estate.

As city, state and federal governments sink funds into Detroit, people are looking for investment opportunities — single-family, multi-family and small apartment buildings. The city's recent announcement to ticket landlords for neglecting properties shows a major turnaround in the way we view Detroit's real estate potential.

At the same time, the Michigan Historic Preservation Network and the Detroit Land Bank Authority led a "vacant, not blighted tour" of homes in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. Touring properties with potential is a huge message of where Detroit's eyes are focused: on investment.

The opportunities are ripe for the picking — if you know what to look for.

The possibilities for strong, cap-rate income with massive appreciation potential only exists in neighborhoods; that's where undervalued deals reside. Detroit is vast. If you don't know the lay of the land, you might choose a bad block and be disappointed in your investment.

Of Detroit's 139 square miles of city, only a tiny percentage is already gentrified: Downtown and New Center, Midtown and Corktown. These areas get a ton of press and attention, because that's where multimillion-dollar deals go down.

The rest of the city has many pockets where investors are doing huge deals and making a ton of cash in aggregate. Maybe 1,000 investors are devoting $100,000 here and $50,000 there, adding up to millions upon millions of dollars of investment in the Motor City.

Perhaps like Detroit itself, there is no one big story when it comes to residential real estate investment. These are small-potatoes opportunities in which average folks can participate. To me, this is the story of Detroit itself — little-known, under-the-radar, small-splash but significant.

While people post on social media and national news reports on the turnaround of the Michigan Central Train Station, no one is telling the story of the house on the corner in Denby or Jefferson East, East English Village or the Belgian Triangle. It's happening nonetheless — dollars in, title transferred, cleanup and restored, and poof! — you have a beautiful house where once stood an echoing, shell of a home. People live in it because they know it's now safe and functional, and also affordable.

This is what's possible in Detroit. And it's happening.

Sure, there are areas of this city that will never revive. That's because there are areas where the city doesn't want a revival, where infrastructure taxes the city and the housing stock is too weak to invest in. If we don't have population to inhabit certain areas, it's not worth trying.

But where there is potential — and that's in a lot of locales — you want to pick the good choices, the right houses. You don't want a house in the middle of a block pockmarked by vacancy and lacking pride of ownership, when you can purchase a house one block over with faithful, community-focused residents and a block that's already coming back.

We can't give new life to a city from a couch in another state, investing over the internet. It takes the hard-working core of people who love it here and chose to stay to bring it back. To show investors where to put their money and where to pass on by.

The real estate rebirth of Detroit is a personal story. We have a stake in the success, or failure, of our neighborhoods. Now is the time to come together, to put our money where our mouths are. The government's doing a great job of eliminating slumlords by enforcing the rental ordinance, and there are programs offering massive tax breaks for strategic investment locations.

It's all flowing now. It's Detroit's time. We just need to continue pushing in the right direction to help the market realize the city's master plan of development and rebirth.

Housing demands a lot. Detroit's employees and services are stretched incredibly thin. Think of how much energy and resources they could pour into areas where people actually live if they didn't have to keep up the areas where they used to reside. We can help by selecting strategic properties to breathe new life into, avoiding those where potential is a distant memory.

I see a new Detroit on the horizon. It's a clean and functional city with affordable, safe rental properties, where families and millennials choose to live. It's a place built by teamwork and belief, a place loved by those of us who never left, who can't imagine abandoning our hometown, one of our nation's original brilliant cities.